Before we iron out the remaining bugs and move on, I think it important that we ALL draw some lessons from this experience.

Lesson 1: WP does listen to its members. There was a lot of running commentary in the past few days about how WP wouldn't go back on this issue. That has proved not to be the case.

Lesson 2: Comments can be emotional but should be courteous and focused on the problem.

Lesson 3: It is one thing to change the layout of our dashboards; it is another to change the public face of our blog themes without seeking our input beforehand. WP should not do it.

Lesson 4: The only exception to Lesson 3 above is when the change is made optional ... as is now the case with infinite scrolling.

Lesson 5: Communication is vital in a situation such as this. WP's response was not coordinated and took too long. Also, responding to the former main thread on this issue and then immediately closing the thread was not a good public relations move. If people feel that a meaningful dialogue has been opened, it will go a long way towards maintaining a calm atmosphere while the issue is hashed out.

Lesson 6: Mistakes happen. Usually, they can be fixed. Fixing a mistake is always a good thing.

There are undoubtedly more things to learn from this saga, but I will stop there. Thanks to everyone who rattled the cages to help get a response. Thanks to WP for making the right decision in this matter.

A final suggestion for WP: If you are able to determine how many blogs are using themes with the infinite scrolling option, can you easily see how many have turned the feature off? It would be interesting to know.

All they did was fix the footer widget issue. That is all. When this rolls out to the other themes here that do not have footer widget areas, you will not have the choice to turn it off. That is only an option on themes that have footer widget areas with footer widgets installed.

Excuse me but this intended to be a site wide chnage that will affect all themes except those on which are not accomdating linke DePo Masthead. I do believe that all that's changed is that those who currently have Twenty Eleven and Twenty Ten themed blogs with footer widgets that were not displaying, now have them displaying again by disabling infinite scrolling. We don't know whether or not those using themes without footer widget areas will have the option to disable infinite scrolling when it is applied to their themes. Also note that those using Twenty Eeleven and Twenty Ten still don't have control of how many post appear on the front page as that has been set by Staff to 7 posts.

Thanks for your feedback and patience, everybody. If you're using footer widgets to display content in your blog, you can now disable infinite scrolling by visiting your Reading settings, in your dashboard. We're still working on improving the reading experience with infinite scroll, including how well it integrates with your themes and customizations.

(Also, sorry for the hiccup on the posts per page issue. If you disable IS you should now properly see the posts per page you set.)

@mannerofspeaking: Sorry, your Lesson 1 is wrong. WP is changing things in this case because the feature was so obviously defective that they have to improve it. But in general Matt has an aversion to negative feedback. (Do you know that comments in the official wp.com blog are moderated?) WP didn't listen when users asked for reblogging to be optional (and Matt eventually closed the main thread). They didn't listen when they imposed a 30-minute block on volunteers in these forums. They didn't listen when users complained about the new HTML editor font (and told us to go complain in the wp.ORG forum). They didn't listen when users asked for the gallery carousel to be optional. The typical responses start with how great for us each new feature is, move to how wrong and how insignificant we are if we don't agree, may include false claims, and may end with: that's it and if you don't like it go elsewhere.

@TT - Now there is some difficult coding: display the option in the Reading settings ONLY if the user has a footer widget activated.

That means constantly checking the theme settings to see if a widget has been added into the footer in order to display the setting in the Reading options.

At least it is better than nothing. You can always have a footer widget with nothing in it - hopefully, anyway!

I agree it would be optional irrespective of footer widgets. However, at least there has been a shift from the original stance of treating the users like naughty children (rather unattractive approach).